Saturday, April 10, 2010

Lots a pics

Ok, here are the pics that I had promised in the previous post.
This was a lemon cake I made courtesy of Martha Stewart for Easter dinner. Unfortunately, in the process of making a lemon syrup, the acid corroded my wire whisk. I then used the metal whisk in my lemon curd, which not only further corroded the whisk, it also left a very very very strong metallic taste in the curd! When did I discoer all this? Only once the curd was mostly thickened. So what did I do, throw it away and start from scratch? Of course not! I just used it anyway and hoped that the lemony taste of the cake would mask the iron-y taste of the curd. Was it successful? Well, I wouldn't really serve this to anyone else, but it is quite satisfying.
I don't get too gushy online about how wonderful Hubii is. But I thought that he deserved this one. I was having a hectic/ tough week at school so Hubii made me a delicious dinner of Mushroom Stroganoff. He also did something else super nice, and I said I would gush about it on facebook... but I forgot. I am truly fail at gushy facebook wife.

Smile Chef Hubii

This is just a cute supper I thought I would share. As close to breakfast for dinner that Hubii will agree to.
Say Happy 33rd birthday Hubii. Enjoy your cake. Unfortunately, it was from a box. This is what grad school does to you: It robs your soul.

It also pays for fun presents (really it does, at least untill I lose my 3.5 GPA)

So, at uni they stick all the grad students who don't have research profs (and some who do) into this one nasty dusty room. I thought I would try to brighten mine desk up a little with this cute mug that an old coworker made and that potted plant. Unfortunately, the mug was brought to its untimely end by an errant cricket ball. No I am not back in India but I am surrounded by Indian Grad students (whoda thunk it?) Some grad students were throwing around the ball and it strayed too close to my desk. Also, spring break was not kind on my plant. It's still alive, but probably on its last legs, roots, something.

When we went to Michigan we, we visited Hubii's Aunt MaryAnne. She gave us some paper lilies that did pretty well. They smelled quite strong though. Good thing that I like it, mostly.

So Pretty: they sparkle. If you click on the photo you will see it.

This is Hubii across the table from me at the Swanky restaurant that we went to for our 3rd anniversary dinner. I remember I got seared duck and... seared duck is pretty raw. I like to think of myself as a wordly foodie, so I chewed my way through a fair bit of it before my jaw and tongue begged for mercy. It was like eating a whole chunk of sashimi without soy sauce or wasabi and with the toughness of raw chicken. Anyways, we had them cook it a little more and it was delicious.
Here we are in front of a pendulum clock from the when Union Station was really a train station.
This is Winnie the poo. "What?" you say. Well this was a food bank event they had at the Union Station. It was a canned/ packaged foods scultpure contest.

This is a six pack. Very meta.
This is a Christmas pic that didn't make it into christmas photos. These cakes were baked by an elder at our church. He is one of the younger elders I think, maybe in his thirties. But he definitely doesn't look like a cake baker. He is bald and big and with a burly beard, he looks more like a hells angel in a suit. But these cakes tasted better than they looked.
The funny thing is, we asked him how we should cut the tree cake and he got confused. He said that he usually just drops them off and leaves. But they were delicious.

Hello My Name is Fuancime Wolfe

Hello all. Now that I woke James up an hour before he needed to be up this Saturday morning, I had time to upload all the photos I have taken recently. We will work chronologically backwards because I have more to say about things that are current.
First, yesterday was amazing! I thought it was just going to be a free dinner courtesy of one of Hubii's students who backed out last minute on a conference. Her name is really Francine and I have no idea how you can misspell it the way they did. Dinner was alright. As I was licking the last bits of my cherry cheesecake I wondered how long and boring the the keynote speaker would be.
I was soo off. The speaker's name is Dr. Carol Browning, who is a CS/ Math professor at Drury University. Which is pretty cool by itself, but she also worked at NASA Jet Propulsion Labs from 1987-1995. And she had some awesome stories. She talked about how the failure of Galileo led to the ubiquitous presence of smart phone. Galileo failed to open completely because some spines of its web became tangled and the next mission, Cassini, had the mandate of no moving parts. They had to find a way to create memory without magnetic tapes. They started to work with state of the art technology called solid state memory and the rest is history, as reported by twitter.
She had a lot of great stories. But I thought I would share this adorable video made from images from the Cassini mission. Sorry I wasn't sure how to embed an online video in my blog.
Dr. Browning's speech was very interesting and I was quite satisfied with it but then they said 'WAIT! We have one more thing for you. And now I will embed a video for your viewing pleasure.



I apologize for the poor quality of my cheap mobile phone video and for my childish exclamations. It was just sooo cool. I know... I am a 12 year old.